[Malorn]

Thanks Tool,

The mission system can definitely key in here. In fact when an empire gains a continental benefit by conquest the "Empire" mission system could automatically assign a mission to the other two empires to break that continental lock.


One thing I've been thinking about is the fact that since resources are continent-based, it wont' matter how many other continents an empire has - you wont' be getting any resources for those continents since you only get resources based on the continent you are currently on. That helps the rich-get-richer problem somewhat because it isn't global richness.

The cont lock benefits actually do change that and provide some incentive to push for dominance, so I can see why that would be potentially dangerous. However, if the benefits are small then I still think it could work out well. It shouldn't be game-changing benefits, but rather a reward for success and something that might motivate you to target specific continents. For example we might have a situation where our resouce consumption is not quite keeping up with demand, but we're close to having a lock benefit on another continent that owuld assist us. We can send a squad over there (or a commander can create a mission) to go get that cont lock so we can better sustain our offensive here. I like that thought a lot for adding tactical and strategic depth.

And you are definitely right about consumption being key. We have to consume resources in order for them to continue to have value.


Also not having sanctuaries and instead having permanent un-cappable bases on every continent will help the rich-get-richer problem becuase it will always give the other two empires a foothold on a continent, even if the continent is completely captured. To explain a little better...in PS1 a dominant empire could remain dominant by restricting the lattice. As they captured continents they closed lattice links to other captured continents. As a result the number of vulnerable bases stayed constant...and in some cases it actually decreased. With this model, if an empire were to capture 3-4 complete continents...as they moved to the next continent the number of responders they need to maintain dominance of the conquered continents increases because of those permanent uncap bases. They're basically like having lattice links that can never be secured. This will lead to two possibilities.

1) The empire steadily leaves more and more players on the captured continents to keep them captured...this weakens their offensive and at some point they won' thave an offensive because all of their empire is busy holidng off attacks.

2) The empire ignores incursions on captured territory...this leads to them losing some territories and the other empires to get larger footholds on those continents.

Both result in making it progressively difficult to dominate more and more territory. Unlike PS1 where lattice link vulnerability stayed constant or decreased, in PS2 the vulnerability increases with each continent dominated.

I think realistically in PS2 we will rarely see an empire completely lock continents. Instead we will see small scale fighting on almost every continent and then a few large scale battles. That also depends on how many players are on each server. We need populations large enough to sustain those battles.